People generally prefer daylight over artificial light as their primary source of illumination. Everybody recognizes the importance of daylight in our daily lives. Daylight is known to be important for people's health and well-being.
In general, people spend over 90% of their time indoors, and often away from natural daylight. There is therefore a need for artificial daylight sources that create convincing daylight impressions with artificial light, in environments that lack natural daylight including homes, schools, shops, offices, hospital rooms, and bathrooms.
There has been significant development of lighting systems which try to emulate daylight even more faithfully. For example, such lighting systems are used as artificial skylights, which attempt to emulate natural daylight that would be received through a real skylight. To enhance the realism of the artificial skylight, the skylight solution is usually mounted in a recess in the ceiling, in the same way that a real skylight would be mounted.
It has been recognized that it would be desirable to enable the color temperature and variation to be selectable or even to evolve over time, so that the evolution of the color point of natural daylight can be emulated, or indeed a specific color point can be selected. Similarly it would be desirable to enable the color temperature to be variable over the light source to emulate the spatial variability of light color from a typical window or skylight. However, this requires a more complex light source and associated control system.
There is therefore a need for a light system which enables control of the color point and variation of color in a more efficient and cost effective manner.